What is Behind Our Need for Constant Productivity?
And how to learn to just be.
Do you ever have these days when you wake up and although you don’t have any pressing matters, nothing that demands your immediate attention, in a sense, you have this great freedom to make this day anything you want to make it, and you sit there on the bed dreading the fact that you even need to do anything.
No, this is not the case of depression, not the case of nothing brings enjoyment anymore. Things do, but it is almost some sense of removal, some sense of detachment from the body and mind.
I feel like they are weighing me down.
I have a mind that needs to think, it wants some stimulation, it cannot imagine to just stay and be, and then there is the body that has all kinds of needs to be fulfilled.
I stay and breathe and wonder which one will be first, which one is going to get me out of the bed and send me on another pursuit of something not particularly meaningful but supposedly very important.
Today my mind won.
It couldn’t stop looking at the withered flower by the side of my bed. Actually, I was waiting for it to wither so I can dig out the flower bulbs and plant them again in September. The leaves are not fully yellow yet, but my mind says: “It has been so long. It really bothers me. Please get rid of it already.”
Okay, I guess I have to. Today it seems utterly annoying.
Since we are up, let’s fix a few other things in the room, things that are going to make it look more pleasant, to put my mind to rest. But is it really about pleasantness?
Well, I do like to explain my OCD tendencies with that excuse, but really this compulsion to always do, to always be productive and useful reveals something much deeper.
They say it is the outcome of our culture, the culture of doers, the culture of capitalism. And they do have a point.
They are the authors of the emerging self-help books with the self-telling titles such as “How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy”. Partly, of course, they are right.
Economy, technology, and a myriad of other things in the complex world that we live in play the role, but these things are not to blame. The problem is still an internal one.
Why do some of us really struggle not to work, not to do, not to always be productive, while others seem to have a healthy relationship with their own productivity and efficiency?
Do you think it is because they read all these books or know some secret that makes it easy for them? Perhaps, it is something to do with their personality, but personalities are not something we are born with, we develop them.
Our childhoods are where it all begins, but we are not to blame our parents either. We are here now, and the problem with our inability to stop working is essentially a self-esteem problem. It is not believing that we are good enough if we are idle. It is not knowing that we are worthy even if there is no external evidence to our worth.
Cleaning up makes me feel good. Part of it, of course, is pleasantness, but part of it is also a sense of accomplishment. Feeling like my day accounts for something, feeling like I account for something.
These small daily achievements were crucial for me when I had no work ethic when I truly believed that I was bad and had no worth when I could easily spend days watching Netflix and getting high.
These daily tasks are crucial for anyone who is trying to build up their self-esteem. But once you came to a place where you no longer believe that you are inherently ‘bad’, it is time to work on believing that you are not just ‘good’ but you are ‘good enough’.
You need the crutches to walk if your leg is broken, but if your leg has healed, relying on your crutches is counterproductive.
Same here, you have to throw away the crutches. You have to stop relying on external things to make you feel worthy.
You have to make yourself feel worthy from inside.
This doesn’t mean going back to the couch potato lifestyle, but sometimes it means allowing yourself to be idle. It also means being okay with it.
At some point, I was a productivity junkie, where no minute of my day shouldn’t be left unproductive. If I am doing my nails, cleaning, cooking or any other activity, which supposedly doesn’t require much of my mind’s attention, then I am also listening to a podcast and learning something.
Never to waste that precious energy, never to give myself a break.
Never just let myself be.
Ironically, this was my biggest wish as a child. I just wanted to be left to be. My parents instead took me to all kinds of places and activities. No weekend was to be spent at home being idle.
This is also where my constant sense of urgency comes from too. I always feel like I am about to be disturbed and interrupted. I never know how much time I have left, so I always rush through the things.
My parents are not to blame of course, they were dealing with their own problems at the time and ultimately just wanted the best for me. But it is also from them that I have learned that being is not enough, being is a waste of time. Doing, on the other hand, depending on what and how, can even be rewarded with love and affection.
Life became a hustle for love before life had to become a hustle for anything else. We think it is about the economy, money and what else, but first and foremost, it is about us withholding love from our own selves.
Meditation comes to mind as one of the ways in which we can just be and not do, but its popularity made it in yet another item in our to-do lists. Another means to an end — ironically, the end is more productivity.
In fact, the introduction of meditation rooms and programs at the workplaces across North America are primarily orientated towards improving work performance. At some point, there has even been a theory that the two might be incompatible, given that meditation involves a different cognitive model of ‘being’ in contrast to ‘doing’ that characterizes the business world.
“The being mode involves a shift in our relation to thoughts and feelings. In doing mode, conceptual thinking is a core vehicle through which the mind seeks to achieve the goals to which this mode of mind is dedicated” — Excerpt from the book “Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression”
We can perhaps understand their concerns, although in organizations that value thoughts and feelings of their employees the ‘being’ would be as important as ‘doing’. But that is not usually the case.
Nonetheless, ‘being while doing’ became a solution for those concerned about meditation’s counterproductive effects on workplace productivity.
As a result, more and more people use meditation and practice of mindfulness not to tap into the cognitive mode of ‘being’ but rather to uphold an obsession with doing one.
When practised with an intention of self-love and compassion, with an intention to give ourselves a break and not gain something out of this break, it can bring healthy idleness into our life and get rid of the very assumption that idleness is ‘bad’ and unhealthy.
At this point, I even stopped calling it meditation. Sometimes I just sit with my eyes open or closed and watch my thoughts. And even the whole watching part is not the goal.
I am just sitting, I am just being. For a moment, I am separating myself from both the body and the mind, from any need for action, any need for movement. I just let myself be.
Meditation is just one tool amongst many. Thought work is something I am doing even when writing this article — reflecting on the root cause of my obsession with productivity, has been really helpful too, but also affirmations.
The other day I picked up Brene Brown’s book “The Gifts of Imperfection” as a self-care suggestion based on my astrological moon sign. I love Brene Brown and I love astrology so perhaps I am biased, but within the first few pages, I found something that I needed to hear all along.
Something that I repeat to myself every morning:
“No matter what gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough. I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn’t change the truth that I am also brave and worthy of love and belonging.”
I don’t always believe it, but the more I practice it and let myself be, the more I actually start to believe it.
There are points in life when doing too can be really hard. The key is not to swing from one extreme to the other.
The key is to find balance, to have that self-regulating mechanism that knows when to push and when to let go, when to do and when to be. Perhaps that is what the real self-care is: the ability to self-regulate.
Anna Aksenovich is a writer with a background in Sociocultural Anthropology and Psychoanalysis. She is fascinated in human behaviour and have recently launched her own publication Know Why to dig deeper into the workings of human mind and find answers to ultimate question “Why do we do things that we do?”.